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March 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:47
Episode 442 Scott Adams: Scott Takes Your Questions
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Coming to you with my headset on because I'm going to be taking some audience questions as soon as everybody gets in here.
But you know, there's something that's far more important than audience questions.
It's called the simultaneous SEP. And if you've got a cup, a mug, a tankard, a chalice, a thermos, a stein, Put your favorite liquid in there.
I like coffee, and join me now for the simultaneous sip.
I'd like to begin by reading a passage from one of my books, which is a best-selling New York Times bestseller.
And I just got a fresh copy.
Now, I don't speak this language.
This is translated.
So it's a translated title of one of my books, but I'd like to read you just a little bit from...
Again, I said I don't know the language, but I think I can work through it pretty well, so...
If anybody speaks this language, you'll understand this perfectly.
Pretty good, you have to admit.
So if you speak whatever language this is, you can buy this book.
Czechoslovakian, Slovak, or whatever the language is there.
Something like that.
All right. I watched the special Leaving Neverland last night.
Now, I saw part one, which I think is going to give me everything that I really need.
How many of you have seen that special Leaving Neverland?
Let me tell you.
I heard there was this documentary that a couple of people who are adults now were...
We're allegedly going to accuse Michael Jackson of child abuse, of them.
And I thought to myself, how interesting could this be?
It's going to be, we spent some time with him, he did some bad things to us.
It's going to be not that interesting.
Well, the first thing you need to know is that the story itself is really, really interesting.
Even independent of the child abuse part, Just the documentary is really interesting.
I'm not going to ruin it for you, but the lives of the two children who are the adults talking about it in the documentary, just their lives alone, amazing.
It's a really good story.
Now, here's the thing.
I watched it with a slightly open mind in the sense that I'd watched a A critic of the documentary before I watched the documentary.
So I saw somebody who was saying it's all BS, everybody's lying, blah, blah.
So I saw that first. And my impression was that the critic was pretty credible.
It was pretty credible.
If somebody says it sounds boring, it does sound boring.
But you will be really surprised.
There's way more depth to the whole situation than I imagined.
It's a fascinating story, really.
It's horrible and fascinating.
But the horrible parts, even if you didn't count the sexual abuse, you could take that out of the story and the whole thing would stand up as one of the best things you've ever seen.
That's how good it is.
So I watched the thing, and I'll tell you my impression.
My impression is, oh, this is very credible.
When you listen to the two people tell their story, as soon as it was done, I said to myself, well, okay, there's no more doubt.
All doubt on this issue is now removed.
This is as clear-cut as you could possibly be.
The very first person I talked to who also watched it It was a fascinating two-world kind of situation.
Now, remember, we do live in a world in which something that is totally convincing to one person, in this case convincing to me, might not be true.
It's entirely possible it's not true.
I would just be really, really surprised.
So watch it. You have to watch it.
So Manafort only gets 47 months.
I keep trying to be interested in Paul Manafort, but I can't get there.
Are you having that problem too?
You know, Paul Manafort should be interesting because he's in the news.
And it's a little bit interesting, but not really.
Because it's not really enough about President Trump.
And he committed some crimes.
He got caught. He's being punished.
I don't know. But I thought it was interesting that it got turned into a no-collusion story, because the judge apparently said, there was no collusion, and then the president gets to repeat that and send his message around.
So... The funniest story from yesterday is that the House started out voting on or they wanted to vote on a resolution condemning Representative Omar for her alleged anti-Semitic comments.
I'll say alleged because Nancy Pelosi says that Representative Omar didn't know what she was saying and didn't know that her words would be taken as anti-Semitic.
Now that's Hard to believe, but it falls into the category of things which I've seen other people interpret the wrong way.
In other words, we often see people say, the way you're saying that, you must be a racist.
How often have we seen that?
Somebody saying about somebody else, you're not saying exactly racist stuff, but the way you word it, Seems like a clear, you know, racist whistle.
So we see this a lot, and I'm not convinced it's always true.
Sometimes it's just the way people talk.
And so I'll just, I'll still say alleged at the same time.
It looks anti-Semitic to me.
That's my impression of it, but hey, I could be wrong.
So the funniest thing about it is they start out with, shall we have a resolution condemning Representative Omar?
And then it turns into, well, let's make it all hate.
We don't want to zero in on one person.
What about all this other hate?
Why are we only condemning one kind of hate?
Let's condemn all kinds of hate.
And apparently they managed to turn a story about Representative Omar saying something anti-Semitic into, by the time it was written, It was implying that the president was racist.
So they changed it.
By the time they were done rewriting it in committee, it turned from a Representative Omar rebuke into a President Trump rebuke.
Now, if you can be more worthless than that, and it just became this generic thing about hate, but they had to put in some clauses that made you think of President Trump.
If you could be more worthless than that, I don't know how.
I mean, I don't know how you could possibly do that.
Another topic, I was just watching Representative Jordan grilling some border experts about how many drugs get across the border.
And one of the talking points from the Democrats is that most of the drugs are caught at points of entry.
So the idea is That if the points of entry is where you're catching all the drugs, why do you need all this wall in these other parts?
Because all the drugs are getting caught at the points of entry.
And it's funny when you hear Representative Jordan counter to that, which is...
I'll summarize it, which is, so you're saying that law enforcement only catches drugs where law enforcement is?
So the argument is that it should be surprising that the only place that law enforcement catches drugs is where there's law enforcement.
That's the only place that happens.
Where there's law enforcement?
You mean where we don't have any law enforcement, the number of people that law enforcement catches is low?
Huh. How about that?
But it gets even funnier, because apparently one of the experts on the border said that if you were to weigh the amount of drugs that they catch at the points of entry, and you were just going to weigh without respect to what kind of mix of drugs it is, but if you just weighed them, they've actually caught more drugs between the ports of entry.
Did you know that?
Think about that. If you were to measure it by pure weight, there's more that they caught in the places they don't even have people to catch.
They caught more drugs by weight, maybe not by dollar amount.
I don't know how they measure this. By weight, there was more caught where we don't even have people to catch.
So if we caught more by weight where we don't even have people to catch people, doesn't that tell you that there might be like 10 to 1 coming through across the non-walled parts instead of the ports of entry.
I mean, there's no way to know, right?
You'd just be guessing. But the possibility is pretty wide.
All right. Let's take some questions.
I see some people are lining up to ask me some questions.
We've got Jacob, April, and Sean.
Looks like Jacob got here first.
So we'll call on Jacob.
And Jacob, I'm going to ask you to...
Jacob, are you there?
Scott, can you hear me?
Ask your question?
Yeah, well, I was wondering about climate change.
One of the arguments in particular that we keep hearing is the consensus argument.
And now my thing was that even if it was somehow measurable and true, that 97% of scientists agreed that climate change is causing or is cause for alarm then it actually still doesn't matter I would argue that consensus has no place in science because everything that has been a consensus in the past has also been wrong I mean you can go just to nutrition or back as far as flat earth or witches if you want Right.
Well, I would say that the consensus argument is more about the marketing of the science.
So the consensus, when they say it's a consensus, nobody is saying that's how science should run.
So nobody makes the argument that you're debunking.
What they do say is, if you're the citizens, you're not part of the scientific community, we're going to make an argument that you should trust the science, and the argument is, look how many people are on the same side.
So as a marketing statement, It would be useful if the polling on that was anything useful.
In other words, if they asked the right question, then the polling results would be very useful.
The question they didn't ask, the question that was asked, is do you think that the warming has to do with humans?
Basically something like that.
Are humans causing more warming?
And 97% or something like that say yes.
But the trick is, so do the skeptics.
Even the skeptics will agree the CO2 causes warming.
The difference is how much and should we worry about it.
So the poll doesn't even ask the question that is the subject of the national debate.
They ask a different question, and then they try to market it as the right question, but it's not the right question.
So thank you for your question.
That was actually a good question.
I appreciate that. All right.
We're going to now take...
Let's see who else we got here.
All right.
We're going to add...
Hello, hello, are you there?
Hi. What's your question?
My question, Scott, well first I just want to say it's an honor to talk to you.
I watch you every morning with my daughter.
Well, thanks. And my question simply is, if you had to pick one other comic strip, which one is your favorite?
Oh, my favorite comic strip that isn't my own comic strip.
I like Pearls Before Swine.
Pearls Before Swine.
Right on. I like F-.
You won't see that as much, but that's a good one.
Tony Corrello. Those are the ones I'd go for.
Of the ones that are current and still running, if you went back in time, then I'd be looking at Farside and Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes and the old-timers.
Thanks for talking to you.
Have a great day. Alright, you too.
Alright. Next question will be Sean.
Sean, Sean, Sean.
Come to a Sean.
Hi. Good.
What's your question? Alright, here's my question.
When it comes to 2020, what do you think the biggest obstacle will be in shifting 5-10% of the black vote over to Trump?
And do you think he can help to be a part of making that happen?
Well, first of all, if you believe the polling, that's already happened.
But I don't know if I can believe the polling.
When I say that's already happened, I mean that Trump's approval is in the, I think, the mid to low 20% or so among the African American community.
If that's true, and if that influences voting, then it looks like 2020 is already done, because that's all it would take, right?
But I think it's sort of a number of factors that are pushing it in the right way.
Prison reform, I think, probably has a big impact.
I think that the economy has a big impact.
I think the scandals on the Democrat side are having a big impact.
The fact that all the blackface stuff was Democrat stuff.
You know, now Representative Omar is being called out for racism, a different kind, right?
The curse would be anti-Semitism.
But it's just starting to look like there's more racism, more problems on one side than on the Republican side.
So my guess is that it's already done.
Well, thinking about what you just said, I mean, I'm Jewish.
I'm not like practicing or whatever, but I'm Jewish.
And I have a feeling a lot of Jews are going to leave the Democrat Party after they could not denounce anti-Semitism yesterday.
Could be, yeah.
I have a feeling they're going to lose a whole lot of those votes.
Anyway, thank you for your time, sir.
Have a nice day. Continue on.
Alright, you too. Now, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the mere existence of Representative Omar takes, I don't know, 20% of the Jewish-American vote.
At least. Away from the Democrats.
Yeah, I would feel that that would be a minimum.
Because, you know, there's some sort of, you know, lines in the sand.
Let me put it this way.
If I were Jewish, and I watched the way the Democrats handled this Representative Omar stuff, there's no way in hell I would ever vote for that party again.
Does that sound about how you're thinking?
Yeah. Oh yeah, they destroyed themselves yesterday, and they showed that they really, especially with what Clyburn said, when he said that Omar's pain was more recent than the Holocaust pain, so she has a right to say what she wants.
That was rather unbelievably jaw-dropping.
Yeah, I didn't see that reported.
Look at what Rep Clyburn said.
He's number three in the house.
And he literally said that, paraphrasing, but he brought up the Holocaust and that her pain was more recent and that she had a right to feel the way that she feels.
And that's jaw-dropping.
And then apparently David Duke came out in favor of Representative Omar.
Yep. Which...
What do they have in common?
So, alright.
I'm going to take another caller.
Thanks, Scott. Have a good day.
You too. Alright, let's take...
Let's see who else we got here.
Let's take Tom.
Tom, you are...
Tom, you're going live.
Talk to us, Tom.
Hey Tom, do you have a question?
Hi. I can hear you.
Yes. Speak up.
Hello. I'm going to echo what the previous caller has said.
When the whole Black Lives Matter thing happened and you had that periscope, you said, what's the deal?
What's the big deal with this? Nobody got the answer.
And you said that, hey, people who are African-Americans think that their lives don't matter.
And that's why they're saying that.
And I thought, how does that make any sense?
But then when I saw what happened yesterday in the house and that watered down resolution and it went so generic for everybody, I was like, holy moly, I get it now.
I totally understand.
I guess my first question really is, with the whole...
Nice people on both sides hoax.
What's the most effective way to talk to people about it?
Well, here's what I was thinking of doing.
I'd say to them, they'd say, listen, I'm going to tell you something that is going to sound shocking.
And you're going to probably experience cognitive dissonance.
And then tell them that the president didn't say nice people on both sides with the tiki torches.
And then show them the actual quote.
Because if I remember what you said before, if you talk to somebody about, if you predict what they're going to feel and think, and then they actually feel it and think it, you have instant credibility with them.
And to me, this seems like it's ultimate cognitive dissonance, so preparing somebody for it would help them get through it.
What do you think about that?
Yes, that's pretty close to exactly the way I would do it.
So the setup here is that Most people who are anti-Trump believe the news, the fake news, that he once called racist fine people at Charlottesville.
Now the real story is he was talking about both sides of the statue issue have some fine people.
He was not talking about the actual marching racists the way it was reported illegitimately.
And as you said, one of the techniques of persuasion is if you tell somebody what they're going to think as they're thinking it.
Or before they think it, you form a little bond.
So if I were to say to you, I know some of you are wishing I were doing something differently today.
Now if that were true, those of you who are thinking that would say, I was just thinking that.
I was just thinking you should do something differently.
You form a little bond.
That's a little persuasion trick.
So to your point, yes.
If you said to somebody, look, I'm going to blow your mind.
I'm going to tell you something that you are positive is true.
You're positive. It's a fact.
You could not possibly be wrong about this.
And it's something key to your total understanding of this president.
And I'm going to show you right in front of you that you were fooled.
You know, do you want to do this experiment with me?
So usually you get people at least play along.
Now the first time you show them your evidence, They're going to say it's wrong.
They're going to say it's out of context.
They're going to say, what could you possibly mean?
So you're not going to get a win on the first presentation of the facts.
You're going to have to work on it a little bit, make sure that they really know you've presented it right, you've shown the right context, etc.
But my experience is, and I've been doing this for the last few days, is that people have sort of a moment.
When they realize they've been had.
And another thing I like to say is it's not going to feel good to you when you realize that you've been duped by your own side.
Because that's what's happened.
So the framework you set up is that it's not you against the person you're talking to.
You say, look, I'm on your side.
The people you think are on your side have screwed you terribly.
Because they've given you fake news and I'm going to show you how.
So I'm here to help.
The people who you think are on your side are your enemies, and now here's the proof.
They told you this.
Here's the actual quote from the President.
There you go. So yes, that's a good technique.
It's probably not a kill shot in the sense that it works every time on every person in the same way, but it's a productive way.
I'm going to take another call.
Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Tom. Appreciate it.
All right. What else we got here?
Well, I cannot resist taking a call from Carpe.
Carpe Dunctum, coming up.
The meme, the meme meister, the President Trump's favorite meme maker.
Carpe, you there? Yeah, I'm here.
What's up, Scott? Hey, how are you doing?
I'm going pretty good. Did you have a question or a comment?
Yeah, I do. My question is, we all saw the energy behind the latest...
Bernie Sanders rally.
Do you think that he has enough energy behind him that he can actually become the nominee this time?
Or do you think he's too old?
I think what's going to happen is that the people with, and this is sort of a standard analysis, everybody's saying this, the name recognition is driving the polls at this point for the Democratic candidates for president.
And as soon as the public sees more of white guys, I think they'll pick Kamala or somebody else.
So Kamala Harris is my prediction.
But here's the thing.
If they go ahead and pick the candidate that has the highest polling numbers now, and let's say it's either Bernie or Biden, they can't win.
Because those two people are not going to bring people to the polls.
I think their entire setup as being...
You know, about identity politics and about really, frankly, being younger.
You know, there should be, you know, when you've got the AOCs, etc., all the freshmen coming into the house, they're trying to move toward this younger, more inclusive, less old white guy mode, and I just don't know it would excite the base enough.
And everything's going to be about turnout.
You know, nobody's really going to be convincing the other side much.
Not much of that really happens, but will they show up for an old white guy who doesn't agree with AOC? Because that's what they need.
So I think it's a problem.
I would say that if you were to poll things right now, there are probably a couple of different candidates who would beat the president in a hypothetical match if we're held right today.
But I think by the time you get to 2020, If all the variables keep going the way they're going, it's just going to be a pretty commanding win for re-election.
That's what I think. Alright, that was your question?
Yep, that's it. Thank you.
Alright, thank you. Let's go to Thomas.
Thomas, Thomas, Thomas.
Come to us, Thomas. Ask your question.
Good, how are you? What is your question?
Well, I'm being driven crazy by what I believe is the truth about the Mueller probe, which is that if Hillary would have been elected, there never would have been a probe.
And I just can't figure out why the media or the press never talked about that.
And if you don't, if you never cared enough, To even investigate what would have happened if Hillary would have won...
Well, we don't know that. Can you square that circle for me?
Yeah, well, the problem is that we don't know that.
So you're starting with an assumption which is not in evidence, which is that if Hillary had won, there would be no Trump investigation.
Now, we don't know that, but we do know that it would be less important Because he wouldn't be president, so he could not have any ongoing influence, etc.
So if you notice that there doesn't seem to be much energy to investigate Hillary Clinton, and the reason is because she didn't win.
So it's not that there isn't stuff there that you could look at with Hillary.
It's just it may not be the best thing for the country to do an autopsy on the loser for president.
Because first of all, they lost.
Second of all, it looks like whoever won is punishing the loser by being in charge of the investigation.
It's a bad look to investigate the loser.
That's a bad look.
You don't want to live in a country where whoever loses for president is also going to go to jail.
That's a terrible precedent.
Believe it or not, I'm actually in favor Of not going after Hillary unless there's something that's really, really, really solid because you just don't want to start the loser goes to jail.
That's just no way to run a country.
All right. Thank you for that question.
Thanks, Scott. Bye.
All right. Next question.
It's going to be looking at all my options here.
Let's go to Alex who is up first.
Alex. Can you hear me, Alex?
Alex, do you have a question?
Yes, I do. I had a couple questions, but two small ones.
First of all, I just want to thank you because you're the highlight of my day every morning.
Thank you. One quick question is about embarrassment.
I've heard you talk about how you don't feel it, but is there any particular exercises or things that you can do Just little things that perhaps you can implement within your daily routine perhaps that would get you up to the level of feeling a lot less embarrassment.
Embarrassed. Now, are you talking about social anxiety or embarrassment?
Because they're different. I would say it would be like when you're embarrassed.
Let's say like you're in a store and you feel like you do something stupid and people are watching you.
You're like, oh my god, this is so embarrassing.
Yeah. Well, you're in luck because...
Sorry. The main thing, so the question is, how do you deal with your propensity for embarrassment?
How do you make yourself a person who is less embarrassed less often?
And I was very much in that situation.
I'm a blusher.
I blush when I'm embarrassed, and I blush easily.
So I had sort of a double whammy.
Internally, I would feel embarrassed or shy, but I would also blush, which would make me more embarrassed and shy.
So I took the Dale Carnegie course, and what they do in the course, you could do outside of the course, which is you put yourself in embarrassing situations intentionally, and But they're low-risk ones.
In the context of the class, each person got up and would do a real hokey play, like they were pretending to be a character, but they weren't very good at it.
So they would embarrass themselves in front of the small class, and then they would sit down and the teacher would say, all right, so are you still alive?
Do you feel any different?
Can you still eat? Does your body feel okay?
And people would be like, huh, I just embarrassed myself and literally nothing happened.
There were no consequences.
And in fact, nobody's even going to remember tomorrow.
If you ask me to remember specifically all of the people in my class who embarrassed themselves that day, I didn't remember them by the time I got home.
So the first thing you want to remember is that people don't care about you that much.
Now, I don't mean that in a bad, evil way.
I mean, literally, people just don't care about other people too much.
So the first thing you should remind yourself is that people are in their own little bubble.
They care a lot about what you think of them.
Think about that. People care about what you think of them, but they don't care much about you.
They're not thinking about you.
They're not thinking about your problems except how it affects them.
The best example was, years ago I got some laser, what would you call it?
I had a laser remove some spider veins on my face many years ago.
And it leaves you with a face that looks like it went through a windshield.
So it looks like you had a bad car accident.
Your face is all black and blue for several weeks.
And I didn't want to go out in public.
Because I thought everybody would look at me and I'd be all embarrassed.
But about a week into it, I was so sick of being at home and I had another week or two of these bruises.
I just said, well, I'm just going to go out and I'll deal with the fact that everybody's going to be looking at me.
And I go out and I go to the mall.
Hundreds and hundreds of people walking by and I'm waiting for people to like stare at me because I look like a freak.
And my experience was nobody cared.
Nobody cared. I think people noted it.
They probably looked by and said, huh, guy with bruise on faces.
Nobody cared. And it took me about a minute and a half to completely forget that I was walking around like I just had a major accident because nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
And it was a valuable lesson.
Now, the other thing, so I would say you want to put yourself in positions where you're in front of other people and Failing in small ways.
So you just get used to it.
So it's like a muscle you need to build up.
On a daily basis, let's say I'm going to the store today, or if I'm going to the gym, there's certain activity that you would say, you know what, just do this, like lay down in public and do something that is very...
You'd like to have Philly or whatever, but maybe it'll help you out with that.
I'm just wondering what I could recommend to somebody who deals with this.
Yeah, I'll tell you.
Here's one. So you're often...
Let's say you're often in public.
You could be in airports. You could be in stores and stuff like this.
One of the ones I like to do is just the stretch, where you just stretch yourself out.
Some call it the victory pose, but you just open yourself up and you go...
Like this.
Now, if you do that in public...
Everybody looks. But you're doing two things.
You're embarrassing yourself a little bit in a very low-risk way in public.
You're putting yourself out there. You're making sure everybody's looking at you.
You're doing something a little bit weird.
But, first of all, they don't care.
That's the first thing. They don't care.
And secondly, nothing happens to you.
And then thirdly, when you open yourself up and you take a deep breath and you open up your chest and your arms, it actually makes you feel more comfortable.
So, yeah, in small ways, I'd say that you could practice that in public.
The other thing that I like to do is be the, let's say the, I don't want to say the aggressor, the one who takes initiative in the social situation.
So if you're likely to be embarrassed or likely to be shy, and you walk into, let's say, a store and you're going to deal with a cashier, there are other people around you, would that be an embarrassing situation in the context of of your question.
There are people around.
You're doing a transaction. Does that sound embarrassing?
Oh, I think we lost the caller. But the point is, instead of being the person who is talked to, you could control the situation.
So instead of waiting for somebody to say, you know, are you paying by credit card or whatever, you just say, hey, how's it going?
How's your day going? And you take the assertive side, but you pretend.
In other words, you take the role of an actor, and you're in public, and there are people around, and you say, well, what a hot day it is today, or whatever you're saying.
It doesn't matter what you say. But you take the actor's assertive role, and it takes you out of the I'm the embarrassed one, and it puts you into, well, I'm controlling this situation.
All this situation is going to go the way I make it go.
I'm going to ask a question.
Somebody's going to have to answer my question.
I now control this situation.
Alright, so those are some tips.
Let's take another caller.
Dan Newman, you are coming at us.
Dan, Dan, Dan.
Come at us, please.
Dan, are you there? Hi.
What is your question, Dan?
My question is about AOC. We have lots of examples of celebrities who may not be the brightest, but they're kind of young and sexy and glamorous, and they're famous for that reason.
So why do you assume AOC is persuasive rather than just falling into this category of just people who are famous, who have sex appeal, etc.?
Well, those are things which help her.
But there are lots of people who have those things who are not AOC. So there are plenty of people who Can have the minimum requirement which is well you look good on TV and you know you're young you got some energy those are the easy things but you wouldn't be talking about those people and in fact we're not the only person we're talking about based on your question is AOC so the first tell that somebody is persuasive is somebody says to me why do you say they're so persuasive and I say why do you care The fact that you cared enough to ask the question is the answer to the question.
Yes, they are persuasive because they got your attention.
Now, beyond that, I think she uses techniques which come right out of the President Trump playbook for persuasion.
She says provocative things on a regular basis.
She says things that are just outside of what you expect, what you feel is appropriate, what is maybe going a little too far.
And there's this narrow zone Between being boring and ordinary, where most politicians are, and you don't even know their names.
I mean, there are people who have been in the Senate for decades, and you don't even know their names.
But she goes in that little dangerous box that's not so dangerous, she's going to lose everything, but dangerous enough that you can't look away.
So that's a Trump playbook thing.
Every tweet from Trump is just a little too far, a little more provocative than you want, but not so much he's going to get impeached over it.
Do you consider celebrities like Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian who have these massive Twitter followings to be persuasive?
I'm going to make a big difference between Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber.
Justin's a young guy, and I'm sure he's very bright in terms of his musical stuff.
So as a musician and as an artist, he's a genius.
In other ways, we don't have evidence that he's clever in other domains.
I don't know if he is. It might turn out he is, but we don't have any evidence of that.
Kim Kardashian is probably one of the most underrated, brilliant business people Of all time.
There's nothing about her success that's a freaking accident.
She has that thing, that X factor, that thing that makes her interesting in general, but she's also made how many different fortunes.
She's navigating this entire empire.
She's caused other members of her family to be super wealthy.
She's the real deal.
So I wouldn't I wouldn't compare Kim Kardashian to celebrities.
That would be a little like comparing Kanye to just a celebrity.
Both of them have extra gears, so I wouldn't accept putting them in the celebrity bundle.
They're more in the entrepreneur, creator, artist...
Change the World, X Factor, Special Category.
I don't know if that answers your question, but I wouldn't treat them together.
What was the question? I think I lost the question.
The question was just how you distinguish, and you answered it.
All right. Thank you. Okay.
Thank you. All right.
Looks like Nuke City is coming to us.
Nuke City? Speak to me, Duke City.
Yes. Hi, do you have a question?
I'd like your comment on...
On the global warming theory, and you can correct me if I say this, Ron, but I believe that if the U.S. contribution to global warming was set to zero, in other words, we stopped all uses of the fossil fuels, according to the IPCC, the effect to the universe, I mean, excuse me, to our...
Well, temperatures would only be 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit, that order, over a 10-year factor.
So doesn't that sort of negate the whole argument about our contribution and what we should be doing if it's only 0.2 degrees?
No, it does not.
So let's take as a given, just for the purpose of this question, let's say that there is a big...
Global warming and climate change risk.
And so the question is, even if the United States did everything it could do, it wouldn't make any difference to the whole world because we're such a small part of it and we're not the main polluters.
And by the way, our CO2 is reducing.
It's mostly China and India.
That is the question. So it's a yes-no.
If the United States went, let's say, Manhattan Project, and we said we're going to use the new Generation 4 project, Safe nuclear reactors.
We're going to, you know, they're relatively, not relatively, they're meltdown-proof, and they eat nuclear waste for fuel, and we're going to just iterate until we've got this, and we're just going to start pouring these Gen 4s out there, save models so that we save money with approvals and save money with design.
We're just going to, like, blanket these things all over the country.
What would happen is it would create a product and an industry, which is these kit-like, well, let's say turnkey solutions for nuclear that would be available to everybody.
So in theory, as a leadership country, we would drive down the cost.
We would prove the economics.
We would create experts.
We would create knowledge about this.
So anything that was a solution in the United States automatically becomes a solution everywhere.
So the spillover effect, I think you could reasonably expect to be extreme.
If we solved our problem with nuclear and China is sitting over there unable to breathe because they're putting so much smoke and CO2 and everything else in the air with their bad technology, they're going to follow us and they're going to do it very quickly.
Now, here's the punchline.
The punchline is, I just read that apparently China is getting quite aggressive on, I think it's Gen 4 nuclear.
So the thing that we say the United States should take some leadership in, we should get ahead in these green technologies, maybe these other countries will do it.
Well, guess what?
China might be ahead of us already.
And they may be recognizing the emergency need.
Somebody's saying thorium reactors in China.
That's right. So I think they're building...
I think they've got some progress in going live in not too long with the thorium reactor.
If it works, then they can start iterating it, tweaking it, and then start rolling it out.
So it's probably already true...
That development and work that happened in the United States and Europe and in other countries probably is already helping China do what they're doing and they need to do.
So given that the world communicates and is connected, I would say yes, the argument that the United States could make a big push and it could matter to the whole world does make sense.
Here's what doesn't make sense.
If we all turn off our lights...
Or if we walk to work, those things will reduce our pollution maybe, and they might be good for the world in general ways.
But just reducing our energy use would not help China's CO2 problem.
So to that part of your question, it depends what you do.
So if all we do is we recycle better and we turn the heat down to 67 degrees, that won't make any difference to CO2. Not in any real way, which is the point of your question.
But if we develop nuclear and that helps other people in the general way that I described, then yes, it could make a big difference.
All right, we'll take another caller.
Let's go with Stephanie.
Stephanie, are you there?
Stephanie.
I can hear you. What is your question, Stephanie?
Dr. Shiva, and I'm sorry I can't pronounce his last name.
And I was ready to...
I loved how he had many degrees from MIT, and I felt like he was a scientist, and what he's going to say is going to be really valid.
And then, you know, and I believed what he said about the...
The climate change being kind of a hoax and how it's become so political.
And then I thought, okay, aha, now I'm onto something because I, like you, I'm kind of wavering between both sides.
So then I looked up who he was and it sounds like he's a bit of a politician.
So then I got a little bit nervous that he's not that true scientist.
And furthermore, I will just say one other thing.
So my family went, many in my family went to MIT and we get the technology review from MIT. This month's issue, which has Bill Gates on the cover, is completely, it's like they're name dropping climate change.
In every article.
So then when he said about it being behind all of the federal grants and whatnot, so I kind of believe that part of it, that climate change is now the new catch phrase, if you will, to get funding and maybe the pure, true science It's getting very convoluted.
It is very complicated.
So let me address those two points.
First of all, I don't think you should hold it against Dr.
Shiva that he has more talents than the average person.
It is true that he has entered a political...
You know, stage of his life, but it's after passing through successful, entrepreneurial, scientific, you know, innovative, passing through all of his educational phase.
The thing that makes him an interesting guest is that the breadth of his experience is sort of jaw-dropping.
Yeah, I appreciate it, yes.
So it's fair to say that he's in a political mode at the moment, But I would say that's just he's adding to his talent stack.
So that's part of why I like him, not why I would criticize him.
And then, yes, I think we would all agree that money influences science.
What we don't know is to what degree.
That's the hard part to know.
All right. Thank you, Stephanie.
Wait. Is it Stephanie?
Yeah. Okay.
Thanks, Stephanie. Let's see.
Looking at some of the other names here, just to see if there's anybody extra fun.
Let's take first appearance.
I don't know who you are, but first appearance, are you there?
Hi, do you have a question?
Scott, it's regarding your most recent tweet.
About the Democrats' refusal to name Ingmar and kind of change from anti-Semitism to just a broad refutal of bigotry.
Could you please differentiate that from...
What the president did, refuting all bigotry instead of specifically naming white supremacy?
Fact check.
The president did specifically refute white supremacists at Charlottesville.
He did specifically refute the KKK, and he has specifically refuted neo-Nazis.
He is also... Yes, I accept that.
I understand that he did, though, receive criticism.
That's not my criticism, right?
But he did receive criticism for not doing that in his first speech after the incident, right?
He was caught off guard, you know, sure, but, you know, I would feel that the criticism that you're loving against the Democrats, as this is also their first response, you know, there's a bit of a parallel, so I would ask you to please differentiate.
It looks like they were in opposite directions.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're saying that the president said generically hate is bad, and then when they pressed him, he said, yeah, yeah, if you're talking about the neo-Nazis, they're especially bad.
So I think he went from general, and then when they pressed him for details, he did disavow the detailed people that they mentioned.
It looks like the Democrats are going in the opposite direction.
Where the original question was about Omar and anti-Semitism, and instead of condemning that specifically, they watered it down by making it generic.
So the Democrats went from a specific thing to watering it down, making it general.
The President started with a watered-down notion, and then when asked, he made it specific.
As specific as anybody would want it.
He named the names, he disavowed them in clear language, and then people said, oh, okay, well, maybe you should have said that sooner.
So they're not quite comparable.
They're actually the reverse.
And then the second difference is the timing, meaning that if you had already watched...
People shoot themselves in the foot saying, what do you mean black lives matter?
Why can't you say all lives matter?
And then you realize that that was a trap?
Aha, if you said all lives matter, you're denying that black lives matter, and therefore you're racist.
So having seen that, And then also having seen the president's problems when, as you noted, he disavowed hate, but then he had to, you know, he had to get more specific and that caused the problem.
Why didn't you say it sooner?
Etc. So given that we have this background, the Democrats should have seen this trap in a way that maybe you wouldn't have seen it if we hadn't fallen into it twice already.
I mean, we fell into the same damn trap Twice, and they fell into it a third time.
So you have to say it's a little worse if it's the third time.
It just feels like it to me.
All right, so I think that's your answer.
I appreciate it. Thank you.
That was a good question. I like that question.
All right, Charles, coming to us.
Charles. Charles, are you there?
Hello, do you have a question?
Well, it's sort of a comment question, yeah.
Okay. I think you, I buy the fine people hoax, that it's a hoax, but I think that you're focusing a little too much on that because a lot of the liberals or leftists who say Trump is a racist, they'll say, oh, well, there's a lot of other things that he's said and done that are I told that to someone recently.
I said, oh, you know, he didn't actually say that white supremacists are fine people.
And I was like, oh, well, there's all these other things that he said and done.
So maybe that's, I think, the problem with focusing too much on just that one thing.
Well, so here's the way that it should properly be set up.
I like to say to people, all right, you're sure of your opinion you think the president's a racist.
Can you give me Your number one best reason.
And would you agree that if your number one best reason turns out to be fake news, that you'll at least consider that you've been had on the other things?
Now, that still leaves them lots of ammo to go back to.
But generally, they'll come up with their first thing and they'll say, all right, all right, I'll do that.
How about that time he took out a full-page black ad saying that...
or a black ad, full-page ad in the New York Times, whatever years ago, about the Central Park Five, and there was, I guess, five black men who had been accused, falsely, it turns out, some people believe, most people believe, because they were released.
And at the same time, the president ran a full-page ad that they should be killed, They should get the death penalty, even though it turns out they were innocent.
So why would he want to give the death penalty to innocent black men?
And the answer is, his full-page ad didn't even mention them.
It wasn't about them.
The timing was the same, meaning that it was no doubt the trigger for the question of You know, deadly crimes were in the news, and certainly it was a reason that he picked that time to make this ad.
But the ad just talked about crime.
So most people...
Why am I fudging on the details, Skippy?
Here, I'll block you so you don't have to hear the details.
So that story is fake news.
But can I say one thing, though?
The Central Park Five thing, he did, I think on Wikipedia at least, it says that he did say in 2014 or 15, he said, oh, it was a mistake to acquit them.
And that could be interpreted as racist.
I mean, Ken Burns said it was racist, for example.
But it would be racist if it's something you wouldn't say about white people, but there's no reason to believe that.
Have you seen this president go easy on white people he doesn't like?
You have not. He goes hard at everybody all the time, and he doesn't like to change his mind on stuff.
So you're seeing a pattern which is 100% consistent for all people, all genders, all everything.
But I get your point.
Yes, it's tough because there's a whack-a-mole problem, but I do like to force people into committing to what is their best point And then removing their confidence on their best point.
That's usually as far as you can go in a single conversation.
So it might at least just introduce the concept of doubt.
It's probably all you can do in one interaction.
And I think that was your question?
Thank you. All right.
Let's go to...
I want to change it up and let's get a...
Let's get Feisty on here.
Feisty, you are coming at us.
Can you hear me, Feisty?
Hi. Do you have a question?
I want to ask you if you ever paid your friend for erroneously calling gastroenteritis stomach flu.
I'm sorry. Say it louder.
Did you ever pay your friend the bet that you lost over calling gastroenteritis stomach flu?
I did not pay because...
Well, it wasn't a monetary bet.
So the Mayo Clinic called gastroenteritis stomach flu.
So I'll take the Mayo Clinic as my source.
If we're going to argue about that I'm not a doctor, so I have nothing to say about that.
I just know that the Mayo Clinic site, parenthetically, said one is sort of the common language that people use for gastroenteritis, which probably includes more stuff, so they're not perfect enough.
But the bet was, specifically, is there such a thing as stomach flu?
And if the Mayo Clinic says there is such a thing as stomach flu, and it's a phrase they use, I claim victory.
You can use influenza.
You're using the word influenza interchangeably with all stomach viruses, and that's where the mistake is.
Stomach flu as opposed to...
Well, I said that there is such a thing as a stomach flu.
Well, I'm already bored with the topic, but I'm not the expert, so I'm not going to die on the hill about the definition of a medical term.
But if I got it wrong, people can check that on Wikipedia.
All right. Thank you. All right.
Let's get another question that does not have to do with definition of words.
Let's go to Stone Fox.
And then this will be my last question.
Stone Fox, are you there?
I can't believe I'm talking to you.
What is your question? Yes, I'm a PhD student and I want to say you challenge a lot of my thinking, but one problem I have is Finding time to write and as a writer, what advice do you have on, you know, keeping up and always improving with writing?
Ah, so a writing question.
I like this. So tips for writing.
Number one, this is the number one tip, is the most important tip.
Your ability to write will be very different at different times of the day.
Now, you would find almost universally true That professional writers prefer to write either early in the morning or late at night.
So they're either writing after midnight or they're writing before 8 a.m., which is true in my case as well.
And there's something about the way we're wired, our biorhythms, who knows what it is, our energy.
But there are times of day when you can do it easily and there are times of day when it's just a struggle.
In the middle of the day, the afternoon is a terrible time to write.
So, that's the first thing, is you should find a regular time, and you should say, okay, this is my regular time, and then make sure you don't schedule anything else that will overlap that.
I preferred getting up in the morning before anybody wakes up, because the moment anybody else in your house wakes up, it's all over.
The first person who wakes up, your writing is done.
So that's rule number one.
So if the first person in your house who isn't you is going to wake up at 7 a.m., You might need to get up at 4.30 a.m.
to get in a little writing or stay up late.
Then the other thing is to have discipline about doing it every day or as close as you can get to every day and at the same time.
You want to have a place you do it that's really good.
Let me show you something that is very directly related to your point.
So right now I'm at my desk.
Let's see. Here's my computer.
Here's my desk.
It turns out this is a terrible place to write.
And I want to show you how subtle the difference is.
So where I'm sitting right now in my office at my official desk is a terrible place to write.
And I say that because I've tried to write here and it's very hard.
Now look at this. This is a view of the opposite side of my office.
You can't see it very well, but let's say you can see there's a chair and I've got another computer and a laptop there.
So this is set right up against the window and so I've got much more light coming in.
I can sit at that chair and write for hours comfortably, but literally 12 feet away, sitting where I am right now, I can't write.
Okay. It is that sensitive to light and position and, I don't know, maybe feng shui, if that's even a thing.
But you need to find that place where your feet are not up By the way, that's one of the worst mistakes you can make is to sit on the couch and get all comfy and put your feet up and try to write.
That's exactly what I do.
Stop doing that. If you're going to write, your feet need to be on the floor or at least on sitting down.
You need to be sitting up.
You need to be somewhere, ideally, where you've got natural light, like a lot of it.
That's why I'm by the window.
It's the natural light that will keep you awake.
If you're in a slightly darkened place, you're working on just the light of your laptop, you've got the fireplace going, your feet are up, you've got a nice warm cup of tea, good luck.
You're going to be asleep in 15 minutes.
Alright, so those are my tips and beyond that you should look for, if you Google my name and writing tips, I think you'll see it all over the internet.
I've got a How to be a better writer, I think, is the thing you want to search for.
My name and how to be a better writer.
And you'll see a very brief list of tips I think you'll find useful.
All right. Thank you all.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for your question.
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